README.md

PageOneX in Ruby on Rails

PageOneX is an open source tool to code, analyze and visualize the evolution of stories on newspaper front pages. PageOneX is an free software/open source software tool designed to aid the coding, analysis, and visualization of front page newspaper coverage of major stories and media events. Newsrooms spend massive time and effort deciding what stories make it to the front page.
In the past, this approach involved obtaining copies of newspapers, measurement by hand (with a physical ruler), and manual input of measurements into a spreadsheet or database, followed by calculation and analysis. Some of these steps can now be automated, while others can be simplified; some can be easily shared by distributed teams of investigators working with a common dataset hosted online.

How is your project different from what already exists? Communication scholars have long used column-inches of print newspaper coverage as an important indicator of mass media attention. PageOneX simplifies, digitizes, and distributes the process across the net.

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Background

The project has gone through different phases.
Initially, this type of data visualization was made through a ‘manual’ process: images of newspaper front pages were downloaded from the web and reorganized in a vector graphics program to draw rectangles on top of them to highlight certain stories.

The first version of an automated tool was a script written in Processing, that downloaded newspapers front pages and generated an organized array of images ordered by date.

The second version is this tool written in Ruby on Rails that you are using. It is developed to be a web platform to provide a ready to use front page analysis tool for anyone with a connection to the Internet. The platform automates the process of newspaper selection, download, thread coding, and data visualization. The alpha version was developed by Pablo Rey Mazón with Ahmd Refat, thanks to Google Summer of Code program 2012 (GSOC) and the Berkman Center as host institution in Summer 2012. You can test the alpha version at PageOneXtester at Heroku.